Rohingya Crisis and EO

I see the Rohingya are back in the news again, after almost all of them turned down an offer of repatriation - satellite imagery is helping monitor the expansion of refugee camps in Bangladesh and other countries where they ended up, plus the razing of their old villages. Most interesting/horrifying was to see that all the work that has gone ahead on Bashan Char (not Thengar Char as originally reported - some confusion on what soggy mud island we were looking at confused everyone). Ive posted about this before on twitter, but look at the gif below from thenewhumanitatiarn.org to see it yourself.

And if you want to see just how precarious living on this island is - look at this map and this map produced by ESA showing how often parts of the island are under water. And that is without rising sea levels..

The Rohignya will be housed right at the edge of that red line, which if you notice in the second image from ESA is only 'land surface' about 81% of the time. That's a lot of flooding.

Fake News Makes it Way to EO

The director of the Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE) has been sacked for presenting results from satellite imagery showing severe deforestation under the current Government, and then arguing their accuracy following official criticism. The data was just added to a dashboard on a government website - no big splash was made of the news, but still it caught the government's attention. The President and ministers said it was all 'lies' and that INPE was in the pocket of a 'foreign not for profit group'. The environment minister is claiming many of those spots have been showing as deforestation for years in 'their data' - but has not released the data nor the methodology to refute the INPE claims.